OK, I finished it last night! It was fabulous and oh boy do I have a lot to say.
I loved how it was in dialogue with not only C. S. Lewis, but like… all the other things I’ve read with deep and mysterious and/or Western ceremonial/esoteric magic.
Laurence Arne-Sayles fits a specific type that fascinates me. He’s not just a cult leader… he’s specifically the slightly mysterious, amoral academic leader who pulls in a small group of extremely devoted followers with deep and mysterious knowledge. The same type shows up in Tam Lin and The Secret History.
Thoughts about consequences
And, of course, none of them really faces consequences.
Spoilers for Tam Lin
When Tom gets away, Medeous is just like… well this is going to be worse next time. No consequences in the text.
Spoilers for The Secret History
Julian isn’t involved in the murders, of course, but he’s not entirely blameless, either. And when things get rough he just sort of skedaddles. He doesn’t hang around for any emotional consequences and he certainly doesn’t get any legal consequences.
Technically, Arne-Sayles does have consequences, of course–he goes to jail! But that’s only a consequence what he did to James Ritter, not for what he did to Sylvia or any of the other people who died in the House. (Likely not all of them are his fault, but undoubtedly some of them are.) No consequences for pulling other people into things, either. He doesn’t seem to feel any remorse or sorrow. Ketterley is the one who has actual consequences, and he deserves them, but without Arne-Sayles he never would have gotten involved. (Then again, maybe he would, if he is indeed descended from or otherwise related to the Andrew Ketterley of The Magician’s Nephew.
Thoughts on Piranesi's memory
Through most of the book I thought that living in the House is what messed with Piranesi’s memory, but as I moved toward the end I thought I might be wrong and Ketterley messed with his memory on purpose. After all, he seems to retain things from after he arrived in the House just fine–like all the directions and the locations of the statues. And Ketterley lies to him about enough things that he could very well be lying about Piranesi losing track of the days and things like that.
But there isn’t any explicit revelation that Ketterley did anything. And James Ritter also seems to be messed up, whether by having lived in the House or having left it. So maybe it is living in the House that messed with his memory? What do you think?
Near the very end, Piranesi using statues as shorthand for people made me think of memory palaces, which is apparently a genuine memorization technique but is also associated with Western esotericism to me because of books it’s shown up in.
The ending also makes me think of this song:
https://genius.com/Peter-gabriel-solsbury-hill-lyrics